be shared by others.
On the final day of Jane’s visit, Eliza Nangle and Grace Warner laid the foundation stone for a building which was to become the home of Neason Adams, the Nangles’ friend who had helped nurture Edward back to health after his Cavan collapse. The Dublin physician was about to devote his resources and medical talents to the colony with his wife. Neason and Isabella Adams would bring a compassion and humanness to the work at the Achill Mission over the coming two decades.
The following year, Jane and John Franklin boarded the ship Fairlie with a party of twenty-three en route to Tasmania, Van Dieman’s Land, where Sir John took up the post of lieutenant general while Jane swept energetically through the colony. In the coming years she would become one of the best known Victorian women of her day through her single-minded efforts in support of her husband’s reputation when he disappeared in the Arctic in the 1845 North-West Passage expedition.
Jane Franklin would explore and travel to the end of her life, driven by a desire to see all parts of the habitable globe. She would be the first woman to travel overland from Melbourne to Sydney, would climb into the crater of a volcano in Hawaii, and visit Alaska when almost eighty years old. Intolerant of injustice, she had a passion for improvement, education and civilisation. Achill Island was as glorious in its natural beauty as any of the places she would journey to, the plight of its people in their poverty and ignorance as wretched as any she would witness. The opportunity and the challenge for the Achill Mission appeared great to her, but there was an ugly sting in its methods which had left her troubled and sceptical.
CHAPTER FIVE
Fractured
In following this story it has been difficult to uncover narratives of individual experiences among the Achill people through the years of the colony. It is as if the personal narratives are merged into the collective of a community struggling with day-to-day, season-to-season survival, leaving few records of individual lives. But we do have the chronicle of Bridget Lavelle, a young woman who reached out to grasp a better life and, in the process, ended up wounded and isolated.
It is not surprising that Bridget Lavelle would have longed for an existence superior to her peasant life. The Achill Mission beckoned, offering literacy, clothing, cleanliness and intellectual improvement – in short, refinement. She had the opportunity to move to a better place but wrestled with her conscience and with the conflicting dogmas presented by the priests and the proselytisers. Bridget sought out the truth but ended up a pawn in a patriarchal sectarian power play that broke her spirit and her health.
In late 1835, as the hours of winter darkness stretched, the Nangle family was seated around the fire in the parlour of their home in Dugort. They were pleased with the work of Bridget Lavelle, the children’s maid who had joined them earlier in the year. Aged twenty-one, she had shown an interest in the Bible, had taken religious instruction, ‘openly declared herself a Protestant’ and moved to the colony, causing much unhappiness to her parents and the island’s Catholic clergy.1
There was a knock at the parlour door and Bridget entered, clearly upset. Her mother, she reported, was in the kitchen and had brought bad news: Bridget’s eldest sister had been seized with a sudden illness, was close to death and wished to see Bridget before she died. Edward was immediately suspicious since the new rabble-rouser parish priest, Father Connolly, had been in the village during the day hearing confessions and he suspected the priest’s hand in the Lavelle story. Bridget was adamant that her mother would not put on such a show of grief if the story were untrue and left to accompany her mother to their home.
Afterwards, Bridget described what had happened. On reaching her parents’ cabin, she found her sister by the fire in perfect health and then the tall figure of Father Connolly appeared: ‘So, my lady, we have you at last.’ The priest had come down heavy on the family, refusing to hear their confessions until they removed their daughter from the Achill Mission and brought her back to her own religion.
In a deposition before a magistrate some weeks later Bridget gave her story. She testified that:
she was living peaceably and happily as a servant in the house of Rev Edward Nangle, Protestant Minister in Achill, where she enjoyed the fullest liberty of conscience, being permitted to go to whatever place of worship she pleased. That she became truly convinced that the Roman Catholic religion is false, and that the Protestant religion is the true, ancient faith. That in consequence of becoming a Protestant she was exposed to much persecution.
Bridget was caught between two worlds: two sets of competing dogmas on the one hand, the attractions of life at the colony versus the pull of her own family and community on the other. Her distress is palpable in the words of the deposition:
that she could no longer use the prayers which she had learned in the Church of Rome, as she believed it wrong to pray to the Virgin … she never could [return to mass] with peace of conscience being persuaded that the worship of a consecrated wafer is the great sin of idolatry against which the wrath of Almighty God is threatened in Holy Scripture.
She described how she was forcibly restrained in her parents’ house and prevented from returning to service in the colony until, one day, she found an opportunity to communicate with Edward Nangle and expressed her desire to get the protection of the law to worship God in accordance with the dictates of her conscience. Edward arranged to meet her at William Stoney’s house in Newport, from where she made her way to Dublin to the house of Neason and Isabella Adams who obtained employment for her in a house twenty miles outside the city.
Living in unfamiliar surroundings, away from the places and people she knew, Bridget now endured a different type of suffering – that of loneliness, home sickness and distress at the rumours that were being put around about her. Within a few months she was writing plaintively to her family: ‘Dear Father and Mother, don’t you know it is not the case, and why do you let it torment you.’2 She was referring to the rumours which, she believed, were put out by the priests in Achill that Bridget had left the island because she had misconducted herself and had given birth to an illegitimate child in Dublin. She was anxious to hear from home and asked plaintively why her mother had not answered her letter when she had sent her a pound.
An unhappy marriage, poor health and an early death followed. Bridget Lavelle’s was a fractured life, a microcosm of the distress caused by the collision of opposing dogmas and an innocent victim of sectarian warfare. Bridget’s story is compelling in its very human desire to seek out a perceived better life which results in a rupturing of the ties of family and community and ends in isolation and tragedy. The individual and family stories of ‘going over’ to the Achill Mission would haunt an island people for generations to come.
***
In the depths of that same winter, a strange scene took place in Dugort when an Atlantic gale appeared as if it would drive the waves to the height of Slievemore itself. If Edward Nangle had relied largely, up to this stage, on scriptural schooling and preaching as the principal tools of his missionary work, he was now about to add another weapon to his armoury, signalled by the arrival of a novel cargo on the shores of north Achill. A printing press was safely delivered ashore, despite the lack of a local pier, and Achill witnessed the incongruous sight of children carrying parts of the equipment from shore to colony. Edward described the scenes in his journal.
Tuesday:
The hooker, with our printing press on board, came into the bay. It blew so hard that we could not land the cargo. The men on board the boat had much difficulty in mooring her: having secured her as best they could, they took to the small boat and, at the peril of their lives made for the shore, leaving the hooker to the mercy of the wind and waves. We expected that she would have broken from her moorings; however, her cable held fast, and towards evening the gale subsided, so that they were able to bring her out of
